FROM NO.1 TOUR TO THE WEST END: SAME SHOW, DIFFERENT WORLD

Before we ever got to Manchester, before the reviews, before the audiences, before the barricade had rolled into the Palace Theatre, we learned one of the most important lessons in live theatre.

If the moment changes, somebody has to lead. And everybody else has to follow.

That sounds quite simple when you say it like that. But in rehearsal, it can be terrifying, thrilling, ridiculous, and sometimes, when I look back on it now, slightly dangerous.

We were rehearsing Les Miserables at the London Welsh Centre, which already felt rather apt, because there were several Welsh performers in the company. We were preparing the first ever No. 1 musical to venture out of London. That had never been done before. A major West End musical leaving London in that way was a risk. It had to work. It had to prove that the show could live beyond the West End and still carry the same weight.

And this was not a little version. It was not some polite copy. This was Les Mis. It was big, serious, expensive, ambitious, and everyone knew it mattered.

During that rehearsal period, we were working on the part of the show around Do You Hear the People Sing. The actor playing Enjolras, the leader of the students, had been told by the director to improvise the scene. The rest of us were told to do whatever he told us to do.

That was the instruction. Follow him.

I was not standing at the side watching this happen. I was one of the students. I was part of the scene, part of that ensemble body around him. And in Les Mis, that matters, because the students are not decoration. They are the force of the scene. It is an ensemble moment. Everyone is inside it.

So the scene began. Enjolras started circling the large hall we were rehearsing in, holding his period rifle. We followed him. Thirty-plus actors moving together, listening, watching, waiting for where he was going to take it.

Then suddenly, he left the hall.

No warning. No explanation. He just went.

And because he was leading the scene, we followed.

Out of the building, across a very busy road, him holding this period rifle up in the air, shouting and chanting, with this entire company of actors behind him. Traffic stopped. People must have wondered what on earth was happening. We crossed into this quiet garden park, did a couple of laps, then went back across the road and back into the rehearsal space.

Nobody could have pre-empted it. Nobody knew where he was going. Nobody knew what he was going to do next. We trusted him and followed with our lives, literally.

At the time, it was amazing. It was funny. It was exhilarating. When I look back now, I also think: that was bloody dangerous. If anyone had thought he was waving a real weapon in the air, who knows what could have happened? But afterwards, we laughed. We really laughed. Happy, happy memories.

And that exercise tells you a lot about why that tour felt the way it did. It was not just about learning the notes, the moves, the entrances, and the exits. It was about building a company that could trust each other. It was about learning that if something goes wrong, or if a moment suddenly changes, you cannot freeze. Someone leads, everyone follows, and together you rescue it.

That was the National Tour. That was the spirit of it before we had even opened.

The tour was not second best

I think people outside theatre often assume that the West End is always the ultimate version of a show. They hear London, and they think that must automatically be the best, the most important, the peak of the whole thing.

And of course, the West End has a kind of prestige that is difficult to explain until you have worked there. It is historical. It is solid. It has longevity. It has a global audience. People come from all over the world to see those shows. There is a feeling around a West End building that you are stepping into something established, something famous, something that has existed before you and will probably carry on after you have gone.

But the truth is, for me, the National Tour of Les Mis was the magic.

One hundred percent.

That is not me trying to diminish the West End. I went into the West End. I was proud of it. It mattered. But if people assume that London was the part I would point to as the great achievement, they would be wrong.

The tour was the part that stayed with me.

It was the first ever No. 1 musical to venture out of London. It had never been done before. That gave the whole thing an energy. It was not a safe little exercise. It was a statement. It was the show saying: this can live outside London. This can be huge outside London. This can carry the same power somewhere else.

And the cast was stellar. Every person in it brought magic to the show. That is not fluff. That is not nostalgia making everything golden. Manchester was having rave reviews. We were being hailed as the best cast yet. It was a very, very strong cast and production, and it genuinely gave London a run for its money.

There was a sense that this mattered not only because it was Les Mis, but because it was the next major step in the life of the show. It was being tested in a new way. It had to fit other buildings, other audiences, other rhythms. The Palace Theatre in Manchester was huge. In some ways, physically, it felt more generous than London. The side stage space in Manchester was way bigger than London. London, surprisingly, was tiny by comparison.

That is the sort of thing the public never really thinks about. From the auditorium, a show can look enormous. But backstage, every building has its own personality. Some theatres give you space. Some theatres squeeze you. Some make the show feel grand. Some make it feel like a military operation in a cupboard.

Manchester had scale. It had room. It had a sense of occasion. And because this was such an important venture, everyone came to inspect it. Producers, creatives, people connected to the original life of the show. They wanted it to be top notch. In some ways, there was a feeling that it had to be better than London, or at least strong enough that nobody could dismiss it as the lesser version.

And it was strong enough. It absolutely was.

The people who shaped it

Part of that came from the people leading it.

We had Ken Caswell, the great Ken Caswell, as associate director. Ken was an original cast member from the Barbican beginnings of the show, so he was not coming to it as someone who only knew Les Mis from the outside. He carried the original bloodline of it. He knew where it had come from. He knew the shape of it, the seriousness of it, and the humanity of it.

We had David White as musical supervisor, and Stephen Hill as musical director. Those names matter because these were not people treating the tour as a lower-tier job. The standard was drilled into us. The importance of it was drilled into us. The sense of responsibility was always there.

And the company itself was unusual.

It was a mix of seasoned professionals, gifted amateurs making their professional debuts, people who were totally green and had never done a musical before, actors who sang, singers who acted, dancers who sang. That mix could have gone wrong. It could have been uneven. But in this case, it created something very special.

There was freshness in it. There was experience in it. There was hunger in it. There were people who knew exactly what they were doing and people discovering the scale of professional theatre for the first time. And somehow, all of that came together.

Every person brought something.

That is why I say it was stellar. Not because everyone was famous. Not because everyone arrived with a grand biography. But because the company had life in it. It had colour. It had danger. It had warmth. It had people who were fully inside the show, not just standing in the right place and singing the right note.

And when a cast has that, you can feel it. The audience can feel it, even if they do not know what they are feeling. They just know something is alive.

Touring creates a different kind of company

The other thing about touring is that it creates a company in a way London often does not.

This was not a week here and a week there. That kind of touring is hard work in a very different way, because you are constantly moving, constantly finding digs, constantly adjusting to new theatres and new towns. Our Les Mis tour was a long tour. A year in Manchester, several months in Dublin, several months in Edinburgh. That gives you time to settle, but you are still away from your normal home life.

You are in digs. You are near the theatre. You finish the show and people go out. You have a drink. You talk. You laugh. You make plans. You spend time together because, in a very real sense, the company becomes your world.

Touring can feel like being on holiday with a show. Not because the work is easy. The work is not easy. But because your life is wrapped around the production in a different way. You are not rushing for the tube, thinking about the last train, or calculating how long it will take to get home. You are not doing the show and then disappearing into the machinery of London.

In London, for me, it often felt more like an office job. You came in, did your work, and went home. And going home could be a long, hard slog. London is busy. It can take over an hour to get back. After a show, unless it is a special occasion, you rarely want to stay for a drink. You just want to get home.

That changes the atmosphere.

On tour, you naturally do more together. On stage and off stage. You develop friendships in a way that is much harder in London. Manchester, Dublin, Edinburgh — that was over thirty years ago, and I still have friends from that time.

London, for me, did not give me that.

That is a very plain truth. London gave me prestige. London gave me the West End. London gave me the famous address and the global audience and the sense that I was part of something people around the world wanted to see.

But the tour gave me people.

The tour gave me laughter. The tour gave me nights out, shared digs, shared discoveries, shared pressure, shared stupidity, shared danger, shared triumph. It gave me the feeling of a company living together inside the same adventure.

And I think that is why it still feels warmer in my memory.

The West End machine

The West End is its own beast.

When you first arrive, it is magical. Of course it is. You walk into a West End theatre and there is a charge to it. You know what it means. You know what it says on your CV. You know people outside the industry understand it in a way they may not understand anything else. If you say you have worked in the West End, people know that means something.

But once you are inside it, you quickly realise it is also a huge machine.

There are lots of cogs. Lots of pitfalls. Lots of quiet rules. You have to navigate it carefully if you want to succeed there. The show is not built around your personal experience. It is bigger than you. It has to run eight times a week, with or without your mood, your tiredness, your ambition, your disappointment, your excitement, or your private life.

After a while, if you are seasoned, it becomes work. My work. Not in a negative way, necessarily. That is just what happens when something extraordinary becomes your job.

The West End version of a show can feel solid, historical, established. It can feel like you are stepping into a building that already knows what it is. The audience is global. The reputation is already there. There is a sense of being part of something that has longevity.

But that solidity can also make it feel colder.

The tour had risk. The tour had discovery. The tour had the feeling that we were proving something. London had the feeling that the thing had already been proved, and now you had to fit into it.

That is a very different energy.

And I think this is where the public assumption can be wrong. The West End is often billed as the creme de la creme. But it is not automatically better. It is different. Sometimes the strongest version of a show is not the one sitting in London with the famous address. Sometimes the strongest version is the one where the company, the building, the creative pressure, and the moment in time all come together.

For me, Manchester was that.

Manchester gave London a run for its money

Manchester was not playing at being London. Manchester was a major production in its own right.

The reviews were strong. The audience response was strong. The company was strong. And the production genuinely gave London a run for its money.

That is important because there is sometimes a strange snobbery around theatre geography. London is treated as the centre, and everything else is somehow a version of it. But anyone who has worked properly outside London knows that audiences outside London are not lesser audiences, and productions outside London are not automatically lesser productions.

In this case, the tour had to be excellent because the whole idea was new. Taking a No. 1 musical out of London was a major step. If it had failed, people would have noticed. If it had looked cheap, people would have noticed. If it had felt like a diluted version, people would have noticed.

So it could not be diluted.

It had to arrive with force.

And it did.

That first rehearsal period at the London Welsh Centre tells you that. We did not simply walk into a room and get told where to stand. We spent time improvising, bonding, getting comfortable with each other, building the company before we properly moved into the text, the blocking, and the singing. There was a whole week of that kind of work before the formal structure of the show took over.

Then, toward the end, we rehearsed a few scenes on the London set. And I remember the comparison being made that our Manchester set was double the size of that set. That says everything about how assumptions can be wrong.

People imagine London as bigger. But physically, backstage, practically, technically, that is not always the case. Some provincial theatres can offer enormous space. Some West End theatres are tiny backstage. The glamour is often front of house. Behind the curtain, it can be cramped, awkward, and very far from glamorous.

That is one of the strange truths of theatre. The audience sees the picture. The actor lives inside the mechanics.

The show keeps changing

There is another thing the public may not realise about long-running shows. They are not frozen in time.

People talk about seeing the original production, or the original show, but with something like Les Mis, that becomes complicated. Over the years, it has been reinvented several times, with new scenery, new staging, new casts, new interpretations, new technical approaches. London is not the original show anymore. In truth, there is not really an original show anymore.

The show has a history, but it also keeps changing.

Even casting changes the feeling of it. In Les Mis, there are different age ranges of characters. In Manchester, there was a mixture of ages playing those roles. These days, you often see much younger performers being asked to cover older roles. That changes the texture. It changes the world on stage. It changes how the relationships read.

A show is not only its music and script. It is the people inside it. It is the building. It is the director. It is the musical director. It is the resident team. It is the audience. It is the period of time in which that version exists.

Each variation can make the same show feel different.

That is why I do not think of Les Mis as one fixed thing. I think of it as a show that has had many lives. The tour was one of those lives. The West End was another. Phantom was another chapter again, because I moved from the Les Mis tour back to Manchester into the Phantom tour, then from there to London, back into Les Mis, and then into the London show of Phantom. So there was a lot of movement between tour and West End, between one major production and another.

But the tours came first. And that matters.

Because by the time I arrived in the West End, I already knew what a major show could feel like when it was built as a company adventure. I already knew what it was like for a cast to be bonded in that way. I already knew what it was like for a production outside London to have scale, pressure, excellence, and magic.

So when people ask about the West End, or assume that must have been the great mountain top, I understand why they think that. But my own experience was more complicated than that.

What stayed with me

The West End mattered.

I would never pretend it did not. It is a major thing to have worked there. It is part of my history, and I am proud of it. But if I am telling the truth, the National Tour of Les Mis was the best part.

Not because it was easier. Not because it was less pressured. In some ways, it was carrying enormous pressure, because it was breaking ground. It was taking something that had belonged to London and proving it could live elsewhere.

But it had warmth.

It had a cast that brought magic to the show. It had a rehearsal process that gave us trust. It had Manchester, Dublin, Edinburgh. It had the feeling of being inside something new, even though the show itself was already famous. It had the madness of following Enjolras across a busy road with a period rifle in the air because, in that moment, he was leading and we were the students and that was the exercise.

It had laughter afterwards. Real laughter. The kind that stays with you thirty years later.

The West End gives you a different lesson. It teaches you how to belong inside a machine. It teaches you how to understand hierarchy, reputation, routine, pressure, and survival inside something that is already established.

The tour taught me something else.

It taught me how to enjoy and survive the show at the same time.

It taught me that a company can become a family, not in a sentimental way, but in the practical way of people sharing a life for a period of time. It taught me that the best version of a show is not always the one people assume. It taught me that a building outside London can hold just as much magic, and sometimes more.

And it taught me that when the moment changes, someone leads, everyone follows, and the company survives it together.

So yes, I worked in the West End. Yes, that means something. But if you ask me where the real magic was, I know the answer.

It was the tour.

A No. 1 tour teaches you how to enjoy and survive the show. The West End teaches you how to belong inside its machinery.

If this spoke to you, feel free to share it and leave a thought.